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Structured English Immersion Breakthrough in Teaching Limited-English-Proficient StudentsBy Keith Baker A few Structured English Immersion programs have been developed and tested in the past two decades. The experience of these programs can provide much-needed guidance to California's schools and to others interested in the reform of bilingual education programs, Mr. Baker says. |
BY POPULAR referendum in June 1998, California's voters replaced the country's most extensive bilingual education program for limited-English-proficient (LEP) students with a program of "Structured English Immersion" (SEI). Adriana de Kanter and I were the first to name and describe such a program when we recommended that schools teaching English to students with limited proficiency try the impressive Canadian Immersion method of teaching second languages.1
In the nearly two decades since our suggestion, a few SEI programs have been developed and tested. The experience of these programs, especially Seattle's, can provide much-needed guidance to California's schools -- and to others interested in the reform of bilingual education programs.
What Is SEI?
J. David Ramirez and his colleagues offer the most extensive discussion of the characteristics of SEI. As the first step in a longitudinal study comparing SEI to two types of bilingual education programs, Ramirez' group reviewed the literature to determine the theoretical and instructional differences among the three programs. Next they conducted extensive classroom observations over a period of four years to verify the presence of these hypothesized differences. But the differences posited by academic theorists were not apparent in actual practice. The only hypothesized difference found to occur in actual practice was the percentage of instructional time teachers taught in English as opposed to Spanish.2
In all likelihood, classroom teachers are exercising their good judgment by ignoring a lot of academic mumbo jumbo that has no practical application. It seems sufficient to define an SEI program as one in which 1) English is used and taught at a level appropriate to the class of English learners (that's different from the way English is used in the mainstream classroom), and 2) teachers are oriented toward maximizing instruction in English and use English for 70% to 90% of instructional time, averaged over the first three years of instruction.3
Ramirez also reviewed the literature on second-language learning in general to identify the properties of a good setting for such learning. He then looked for these properties in actual classroom practice. Again, there was no difference among the three programs: all were really bad places in which to learn a second language. The common problem seemed to be the instructional constraints imposed by large classes. The optimal setting for learning a second language is one that allows for extensive dialogue between teacher and learner, which is impossible in classes with more than eight students. Drastic reductions in class size may be the most productive step that could be taken to improve the instruction of LEP students.4
Is SEI Effective?
Over the last 18 years, I have identified the following programs as effective examples of SEI.5
The Canadian Immersion program, first detailed by Wallace Lambert and Richard Tucker, is the exemplar for SEI.6 Advocates of bilingual education programs argue that this instructional method, although very successful in Canada, will not generalize to LEP students in the U.S. However, the program evaluations that I am about to discuss show that this fear is baseless.
Russell Gersten and his colleagues found SEI superior to bilingual education for Vietnamese immigrants in California and for Hispanics in Texas. An SEI program for Hispanics in Uvalde, Texas, was found to have improved high school graduation rates and lowered retention throughout the grades compared to a prior, ill-defined program.7 The Uvalde program and the one Gersten and John Woodward studied in a California district were all-English direct instruction programs (Distar) used with LEP students. Distar provides a structured curriculum that can be adjusted to the level of the learner and clearly works well both with students learning English as a second language and with English-speaking at-risk students.
Ramirez and his colleagues compared SEI to two types of bilingual education programs that differed in the number of years Spanish was used and in the amount of Spanish used during the school day.8 (Early-exit programs aim to put their students in mainstream classes after about three years; late-exit programs aim for about seven years.) Table 1 shows the results. Late-exit programs were previously required by the federal Lau remedies and by California state law; are currently required under state law in Massachusetts, New York, and Texas; and are the model stressed by advocates of bilingual education.9 The superiority of SEI over bilingual education programs for teaching English is clear.
| TABLE 1. Raw Score Achievement Gains Through Grade 3 for Three Programs | |||
Mathematics |
Language |
Reading | |
| Immersion program Early-exit program Late-exit program |
44.0 |
72.9 |
63.7 |
| ______ Sources: J. David Ramirez et al. Final Report: Longitudinal Study of Structured Immersion Strategy, Early-Exit, and Late-Exit Transitional Bilingual Education Programs for Language-Minority Children (San Mateo, Calif..: Aguirre International, 1991), vol. 2, Appendix C; and Keith Baker, "Misled by Bad Theory, " Bilingual Research Journal, vol. 16, 1992, pp. 63-90. | |||
Kim Yap and Donald Enoki compared ESL (English as a Second Language)10 and bilingual education programs serving 4,000 students in 55 schools.11 The authors concluded that there was no difference in English learning between ESL and bilingual education programs, but, of the 47 comparisons they conducted over several years of school and across several different measures, 31 favored ESL, a statistically significant advantage (p=.018, Fisher's Exact Test). Other examples of effective ESL programs are in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Prince George's County, Maryland.
Texas state law requires bilingual education, as California used to. The Texas law allows temporary experimental trials of alternatives. In the mid-1980s, seven local education agencies in Texas conducted a multi-year trial comparing SEI to bilingual education, which was evaluated by the state education agency. SEI was the clear winner.12
El Paso created an SEI program in which Spanish instruction was reduced to 30 minutes a day. The district followed students from this program and from the state-mandated bilingual education program for 12 years.13 The SEI students scored significantly higher on all tests for 11 straight years. In the 12th year, the SEI students still scored higher, but their advantage was no longer statistically significant, suggesting that, after a decade or so, the harm that bilingual education programs do to learning English is more or less wiped out by continued exposure to English outside the bilingual classroom.
Gersten and Woodward also surveyed teachers in El Paso.14 The results indicate that the teachers in the program using more English were more confident that their students would succeed when mainstreamed (see Table 2).
| TABLE 2. Teachers' Assessment of Student Progress in Two Programs | ||
Percentage of Teachers | ||
Less Spanish |
More Spanish | |
| Most students will succeed in the mainstream after the special program. The program successfully develops oral English. The program motivates the students to learn English. |
|
|
| ______ *The program using less Spanish is statistically significantly different (p<.05) from the program using more Spanish. | ||
J. Webb, R. Clerc, and A. Gavito looked at 16 schools in Houston, eight with SEI programs and eight with bilingual education.15 A LISREL analysis found that SEI produced higher English achievement. LISREL coefficients can be interpreted somewhat like effect parameters in meta-analysis. The LISREL coefficient favoring immersion was 0.6, which can be compared to an effect on learning for nonverbal I.Q. of 0.278. In other words, in the Houston study, the superiority of SEI over bilingual education on learning was more than twice as great as the impact of nonverbal intelligence on learning.
In 1994 New York City issued a longitudinal study of 15,000 LEP students.16 On every measure, those in ESL programs outperformed those in bilingual education. However, since the report did not control for ethnicity, which was confounded with program assignment, the results have been dismissed as invalid. Nevertheless, the report deserves to be taken seriously. There were five ethnic groups included. When these groups were rank ordered by the percentage of students in ESL programs, the rank order correlation between exposure to ESL and the percentage of the ethnic population mainstreamed within three years was r = 1.0 (the product-moment correlation was r = .96).
I need hardly point out that correlations at these levels are unheard of in educational research. This is a remarkable relationship between program and effect. The correlations tell us we can pick any two ethnic groups and predict with perfect accuracy which one will have had the most success if we know the percentage of the population in ESL programs. Indeed, we can pick any three or any four or all five ethnicities and predict with perfection their success in learning English if we are told the percentage of each group in ESL programs. On the other hand, if all we know are the ethnic groups, these predictions cannot be made accurately. We might make some accurate predictions about outcomes -- with Hispanics or Chinese perhaps -- but what about Hispanics or Haitians, Koreans or Chinese, Russians or Chinese? What if we go to triples? What is the academic rank order of Chinese, Koreans, and Russians? Given only the ethnicity, we don't know, but once we know the percentage in ESL programs, we can answer all these questions accurately. The relationship between ethnicity, type of program, and outcome is beyond coincidence. It is not necessary to statistically control for ethnicity to see that there is a difference in effect between the programs.
California's Proposition 227 imposes the added constraint of requiring LEP students to be mainstreamed after one year. Although many of the SEI programs described so far mainstream their students in two to three years, compared to the five to eight years called for by a full bilingual education program, the only SEI program I know that can satisfy California's new law is Seattle's Newcomers Program. LEP students in Seattle are first placed in "Newcomer Centers" for half a year to one year, where they receive intense instruction in English. After no more than a year, they are mainstreamed. They get additional help in the mainstream classroom as needed through ESL instruction and native language support from bilingual teacher aides.
Madeline Ramey and I looked at test results over three years for three groups of students in Seattle: 1) LEP students in the ESL/native language support program, 2) LEP students whose parents opted them out of the program into the mainstream classroom, and 3) English-speaking students from the mainstream classroom scoring below the 35th percentile, the score used to classify language-minority children as LEP.17 Table 3 clearly shows that LEP students benefited from the program.
| TABLE 3. NCE Gains over Three Years (1991-93) for LEP and Non-LEP Students in Seattle | ||
| Reading | Ave. NCE Gain |
N |
| LEP students in the program LEP students in mainstream Non-LEP students below 35th percentile in mainstream |
7.7* |
1,223 |
| Language | ||
| LEP students in the program LEP students in mainstream Non-LEP students below 35th percentile in mainstream |
6.9* |
958 |
| Math | ||
| LEP students in the program LEP students in mainstream Non-LEP students below 35th percentile in mainstream |
7.8* |
1,250 |
| ______ * The gain for LEP students in the program was significantly greater (p<.01) than the gain for either of the other two groups. | ||
The LEP students in the program gained about twice as much in terms of NCEs (normal-curve equivalents) in a year18 as did LEP students whose parents opted them out of the program and into the mainstream classroom.19 This outcome shows that the Seattle program -- a model for the requirements of Proposition 227 -- is remarkably effective in moving LEP students toward full participation in an English-speaking society.
How Does SEI Work?
Although SEI, which uses more English than bilingual education programs do, results in students' learning more English, it is not merely a matter of additional time on the task of learning English, as Rosalie Porter has simplemindedly asserted.20 The teachers of Ramirez' early-exit students (Table 1) used considerably more Spanish than did the SEI teachers, with equally good results. Adriana de Kanter and I identified a few bilingual education programs in which LEP students learned more English than did comparable students in an all-English setting.21
Some (minimal) use of a student's non-English language may help in any or all of several ways. It may make the student more comfortable in school. It may more quickly get through really difficult communication problems between teacher and student. It may boost student self-esteem.22 It may help motivate learners. It may take advantage of the powerful effect of massed versus spaced trials on learning.
On the other hand, monolingual teachers can also do well in teaching LEP students. Gersten concludes that, "based on the two years of observational research and analysis, . . . monolingual English speaking teachers can work productively with language minority students, and teachers need not radically alter their approaches to teaching to be successful."23 Joan Fitzgerald notes that "teachers of ESL students could follow sound principles of reading instruction based on current cognitive research done with native English speakers. There was virtually no evidence that ESL learners need notably divergent forms of instruction."24
Adjusting instruction in English to the learner's level of English seems important, if not essential. Seattle did something with its ESL students that did not happen to fully mainstreamed LEP students. The two direct instruction programs that Gersten examined, which I mentioned earlier, used a structured approach in which teaching was adjusted to the level of the learner.
Although it apparently has not been addressed in the research literature, it seems that an important ingredient in teaching English is a teacher with a good command of standard English who can model English well. This point is indirectly supported by several studies showing that the more competent teachers are by the standards of bilingual education programs, which place a premium on speaking some other language, the less well their students learn English.25
Classroom aides who speak a non-English language contribute to an SEI program by providing instructional support to children having temporary difficulty following a lesson in English.
Why Use SEI?
California's schools have no choice. Others should consider SEI as an effective alternative to bilingual education programs for meeting the legal requirements of Lau for teaching LEP students. Another important reason to use SEI is that it solves a vexing problem in bilingual education programs. Assuming that bilingual education program theory is correct, there is no valid method of identifying which students will benefit from bilingual education. LEP identification procedures and the procedures used to determine when a student is ready to move from a bilingual education program to the mainstream classroom are psychometric nightmares of error and false assignments. One major error is assigning students who speak and use English better than they speak or use another language to bilingual education programs.
The only valid information known about LEP students is that they need help with English. Therefore, teaching and helping them in English is indisputably correct. The assumption that we can identify those students who need help in English because they depend on some other language is invalid; it can't be done at any acceptable level of accuracy. SEI, especially the direct instruction model, finesses the identification problem by using English to teach students having trouble with English -- not some other language they may or may not know well enough for schooling.
Moreover, many local education agencies as well as the states of California and New York require a LEP student to pass both an English reading and an English language standardized achievement test at the 40th percentile. By definition, 40% of the monolingual English-speaking population could not pass a 40th-percentile cutoff. To make matters even worse, the joint requirement -- the 40th percentile on two subtests -- is about a 60th-percentile score on the total test battery. The majority of monolingual English-speaking students could never pass the test to get out of these programs.
California's new law solves this problem with heavy-handed finesse -- everybody is mainstreamed after one year. Even if California continues its absurd 40th-percentile cutoff score, it is no longer a problem: 1) LEP students will be in the mainstream after no more than one year, and 2) schools will probably have to continue to give them extra help in English after they are mainstreamed until they meet the English cutoff score -- performance higher than the typical native English speaker. California's new law seems to have inadvertently created a program of extensive help in English within the regular classroom setting until LEP students master English at a level well above that of the average English speaker. While this may be silly in some respects, it is an interesting civil rights program, in that it provides extra help to language-minority students until they surpass the majority. Since lack of English ability is the driving force behind the low socioeconomic status of language minorities in the U.S., the overdose of English instruction produced as a side effect of California's new law will be of great help to these children in an English-speaking country.
Conclusions
SEI is not necessarily an all-English program, but it does make considerably less use of the non-English language for instruction than does bilingual education.
Schools that decide, or are forced by law, to change to SEI do not face as formidable a task as many fear. Not only have others paved the way in developing effective SEI programs to serve as a model, but also the job seems easier to do than most believe. The schools discussed earlier created effective SEI programs without much trouble, and they did it in the face of considerable opposition from bilingual education program advocates, college professors, and state and federal educational bureaucracies.
Linguists and professors of second-language learning and bilingual education overdramatize the difficulty that LEP students face in learning English. Humans are remarkably good at language learning. There seem to be only two ways to screw up a LEP child's opportunity to learn English. The first is to use too much of the non-English language in the classroom, and this seems to be the problem in many bilingual education programs. The second is to fail to realize that LEP students face a more demanding task in school than do native English-speaking students. LEP students have to learn everything in the curriculum and then learn English on top of it.
Both bilingual education and SEI theory maintain that this extra learning load can be handled within the normal school day, although by different mechanisms. Bilingual education posits that it can be done by teaching non-language subjects in the non-English language while the student is learning English. There is very little research support for this contention, and considerable evidence to the contrary.26 SEI argues that content and English can be taught together by teaching content through learner-appropriate English. Despite the demonstrated successes of SEI, this is asking a lot. Much can be said for extending the school day or the school year for LEP students as perhaps the best way to meet their special needs.
Finally, direct instruction is particularly interesting since it works well with both monolingual at-risk students and with LEP students. A program with this kind of record should not be ignored.
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